In an exhaustive survey prepared by David Barstow and Robin Stein, the New York Times made clear on Sunday the heretofore-unknown extent of the efforts of the Bush administration to flood the airways with “pre-packaged ready-to-serve” video news releases produced by agencies of the federal government but dressed up to look like “news reports” prepared by “reporters.”
In all, wrote Barstow and Stein, “at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years,” aided by “widespread complicity or negligence by television stations,” in contradiction to “industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.”
In most such cases, of course, the supposed “reporters” at work do not state in the segment that they are paid shills for the government — one more teeth-gnashing example of Your Tax Dollars at Work. Said segments often feature “interviews” with senior government officials “in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics of any given federal program, however, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy. (Check out our continued coverage of the wretched phenomenon.)
The Times explores “a world where traditional lines between public relations and journalism are tangled…a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as ‘independent’ journalism.”
It’s a world irresistible to cash-strapped, resource-starved local stations, who are thus spared the expense of actually reporting their own material, and one enabled by major networks which help distribute the video news releases, and who collect fees from both the government agencies that produce the spin and local affiliates that air it as “news.”
The Times also informs us that, despite three separate rulings by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress that monitors government spending, that such segments constitute “covert propaganda,” just last Friday, both the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget instructed all executive branch agencies to ignore the GAO findings and continue the business of stealth PR as usual.
The piece touches on the role of the notorious Karen Ryan, whom you’ve met at CJR Daily before, but who, in the larger scheme of things, turns out to be a very small apple in this very large and very rotten barrel. (One firm, Medialink Worldwide Inc., has about 200 employees, with offices in New York and London, and distributes about 1,000 video news releases a year — nearly three a day. To put that in context, that’s a larger force than the vast majority of newspaper or TV station managers have at their command. ) Though the ethics codes of both the public relations industry and the Radio-Television News Directors Association call for clear disclosure of the origin of information, the Times notes that it’s not hard to find either PR firms or broadcasters who blithely ignore existing codes.
Kudos to the Times for doing the digging to reveal just how many worms, snakes and bugs are under this very large rock.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.